Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Peter Ford.
He used to be the UK ambassador to Syria and Bahrain before joining the United Nations.
He is the co-chairman of the British Syrian Society, and he recently wrote the piece, Is a Syrian Suez Approaching?
So welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
I'm good.
Thank you for the invitation, Scott.
Looking forward.
Yeah, very happy to have you here.
So first of all, tell us, what was the Suez crisis for those not familiar?
Well, it was important in British history.
It was in 1956 when the UK colluded with France and Israel to invade Egypt and grab back the Suez Canal from Nasser.
They were hoping, actually, that it would cause the downfall of Nasser's government.
But it all went pear shaped, partly because the United States, which in those days, 1956, remember, was not too happy about imperialism, or at least European imperialism, came riding over on a white horse and told those pesky Brits and French to get out of there.
And they indeed had to do that.
The whole thing was a fiasco.
But the important point for today is that the invasion of Egypt by France and Israel and the UK was based on fake news, essentially.
It was a plot.
The Israelis went in, prearranged with the Brits and the French.
And then the Brits and the French came in saying, oh, we have to keep the Egyptians and the Israelis separated.
That was the pretext.
So this was all about creating a pretext.
But it all ended in tears.
Yeah.
Well, and so I think a lot of people have taken note.
It's been days and days now since the Americans started rolling out, pretty clumsily rolling out, the pretext for an attack against the state in Syria.
As the Syrian government prepares to clamp down on the last of the jihadists and their allies in the Idlib province, the Americans claim to just know that the Syrians are preparing to use chemical weapons and that if they do, the Americans will attack.
So do you think they're really setting up a pretext for further conflict there?
I'm convinced of it.
It's nailed on.
Every day that passes brings a new piece of evidence, a new threat.
The drumbeat of war can be heard constantly.
Just yesterday, Ambassador Nikki Haley in the UN spoke of dire consequences.
If Assad attacked Idlib, John Bolton almost every day, the new jihadi, John, because he seems to want to support the jihadis in Idlib.
He was threatening that the next time Assad uses chemical weapons, we're going to come in much, much more heavily.
It's a constant refrain.
What they're doing is conditioning opinion.
It's very clearly, transparently orchestrated.
And of course, the mainstream media just falling into line on this.
It's very transparent and very worrying and very imminent.
Well, I got to tell you, I mean, I sure see where you're coming from on that.
I guess my only kind of hesitation is in the nuance of just how not nuanced this is, where it's so kind of clumsily set up that I wonder if there's another interpretation.
So I'll try this one on you.
And this is something that Patrick Coburn mentioned on the show when I talked with him earlier today, was basically all this stuff is discussed in committee in the National Security Council and in the White House and whatever meeting rooms and whatever, where these people have to come to agreement from all their stupid points of view that they all have.
He didn't say that part.
And so, you know, I could imagine a situation then where so Trump was made to agree or whatever, whoever came up with the line will be they better not use chemical weapons or they better not just do full scale massacres of civilians.
And if they cross these lines, then that'll be something.
And then Trump even went on Twitter and said something that could certainly be interpreted as a threat.
But it also had this wiggle room where he said Assad must not recklessly attack Idlib and massacre hundreds of thousands of civilians, which is actually setting the bar pretty high for intervention, if you put it that way.
Well, he's he's sure bombing them, but he's not being too reckless about it.
And casualties are still in the thousands, not the tens or hundreds.
And so maybe that much he's saying is permissible if you read the tea leaves that way.
And and so maybe in essence, he's saying, don't don't use chemical weapons, dude, because they want me to.
I'm going to have to attack you if you do.
So here's a warning not to.
Rather than just an invitation to Al Nusra that you guys go ahead and frame him up for an attack and I'll exploit it.
And, you know, again, because and I'm not trying to take Trump's position and give him too much of the benefit of the doubt here.
But he is one among many.
And he did call off CIA support for the jihadists a year ago.
It seemed like he didn't he didn't really want to fight the Assad government over protecting Al Qaeda fighters in Idlib.
You know, I think I agree with that.
I sense that Trump's instincts are much more sound on the whole issue of intervention in the Middle East.
He basically wants to bring the boys home, but he is blocked every step of the way by the permanent government.
The usual suspects, the neocons, et cetera.
And so every now and again, as you mentioned, he tweets something that kind of gives him some wiggle room.
But I think he's now a captive of the permanent government.
They have made it impossible for him now to avoid heavy bombing of Syria if there is a chemical attack.
And the jihadis would be crazy not to stage a fake chemical attack.
You would, wouldn't you, if you were them, knowing that it was a cast-iron certainty that it was going to bring the Pentagon in on your side?
I think Trump has no more wiggle room.
And is he really running America?
You tell me.
Well, we have three hoaxes as background here when it comes to chemical weapons.
We have no legit attacks and three false flags.
So what's that tell you?
And but, you know, I don't know.
It is kind of funny, though, isn't it?
The way I guess I'm just a little bothered the way it doesn't feel right, the way that they're so clumsy in setting this up.
You know what I mean?
If they're really just going to go ahead with the other half of the plan next week.
You're too sane, Scott.
Your problem is you are too sane.
That may be it.
But you know what it is, too, is the stakes are so high.
But what are they going to do, Pete?
Are they going to now start a massive air campaign against Assad or it'll just be another few strikes?
Or what do you think?
Well, look at it this way.
What's to stop a series of massive airstrikes?
What is you know, what is to stop it if they decide that's what they want to do?
What is going to stop it?
Certainly not the media.
The media is going to be cheering them on and demanding ever more.
Right.
Well, certainly not Congress.
Certainly not the allies.
What about the Russians?
They got H-bombs.
And this is after all, they're the, you know, the kind of the counterpart to American force here on the jihadist side.
The Russians are kind of the overlords over Iran and Syria in a sense here.
And so we only can play this game within some kind of reasonable rules.
Right?
Well, we must hope so.
But these are high stakes and high risks.
You're right.
We're relying on Russia to exercise some adult supervision here.
But that is not a good basis for world peace.
And not with the Russophobia that we have in the West at the moment, rampant as well.
No, I think the situation is extremely frightening.
And that's why it's so important for people like you, alternative voices, to make themselves heard.
And to call out, to call out the phoniness of the coming fake attack.
Yeah.
Well, so how far, I'm sorry, I'm just behind on the news on this.
How far have the Syrian army and the Russians and what have you gone in the start of the attack on Idlib?
They just were doing some softening up bombings a couple of days ago, I saw.
But they haven't begun to move infantry in there yet, have they?
That's correct, Scott.
It's the usual softening up process, mainly by Russian planes.
I'm not even sure that any Syrian helicopters are going in at all.
But this will not stop the fakers.
It's enough for them to make an allegation, which then get reported as reports.
You know, these famous reports like with Douma, there were reports and that was enough for the media.
No need to verify anything.
No need to let the international inspectors go in there.
And by the way, when they did go in there, they found zilch evidence.
No, this is the really scary thing.
There is nothing to prevent massive escalation.
Yeah, well, and I mean, the al-Qaeda guys that are left in Idlib province, well, a couple of things.
First of all, the fighters, so-called rebels, and Ra'ar al-Sham and whatever groups, they're already beaten anyway.
The fact that they only have Idlib province left goes to show that the war is virtually over.
And so, you know, I guess it would make sense on the face of it that, you know, the civilians there, their lives are certainly in jeopardy.
But it doesn't make sense for anyone on NATO's side at all to argue, to start Obama's policy back up and support these jihadists in winning anything, anywhere at this point.
Maybe just, you know, trying to work on opening a humanitarian corridor for civilians to flee or something like that, you know, I don't know.
Scott, David Ignatius, a couple of days ago in the Washington Post, revealed that the strategy is to create a quagmire for the Russians and the Syrians.
If you can't win, make sure the other side don't have a success, don't have a victory.
This is the strategy, to make Idlib a quagmire.
In reality, Idlib is Tora Bora, and the jihadis are the Taliban.
But the Western powers want to turn it into a quagmire.
Well, remember, there are up to there between 70,000 and 100,000 jihadi fighters in Idlib.
That is more than the size of the British Army.
Yeah, I mean, in fact, it's like Tora Bora in that it's the al-Qaeda guys escaping.
That's the real question.
Where are all these guys going to go?
Because they're not all going to die in this assault.
They're going to melt away.
They got in through Turkey.
They'll go out through Turkey.
Turkey is already offering safe passage to them.
The Turks would like to de-escalate.
And so they've been in recent days offering safe passage to the foreign fighters, including the al-Qaeda guys.
No, the media say, oh, people have got nowhere to go.
Wrong.
Baloney.
Turkey.
They can all go to Turkey.
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Yeah.
And from there onward into Europe.
And, you know, this was predicted from 2011 on that, hey, we should not be letting our governments intervene on the side of the jihadists.
These guys are going to come home one day, especially when they're encouraging European Muslims to go and join up.
And these are guys who are going to be able to get back into the country later on.
And could, I'm not saying all necessarily will, but could be sleepers or even just decide to act as one years later if they want.
You know, now that they have skills picked up on the battlefield where our side supported them for years there.
So, I mean, if you think about it, the al-Qaeda yesterday was September 11th, right?
So everybody's got that on their mind.
That was done by the guys who were the leftovers from supporting the jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 80s.
And then George Bush exploited that problem to go ahead and invade Iraq, where he created a whole new generation of these guys in Iraq War II.
Then they came home to Libya and Syria, where Obama took their side, just like Reagan had done, and supported them in their jihads there.
And then when that blew out of control and out of proportion into the Islamic State and they had to turn around and take it down again.
Well, now I got a whole new generation of jihadis coming home from Syria.
And again, to places like France and England, where they came from.
Exactly.
Our governments have been encouraging this by demonizing the government of President Bashar al-Assad and Assad personally.
He's described by former Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron, as the butcher Assad.
Trump calls him the animal.
You see the process of demonization.
Is it any surprise that impressionable young Muslims hearing this think, wow, this must be right.
I should go and join the Islamic Foreign Legion.
So it's really partly down to our own leaders for whipping up this extremism.
But now the chickens are coming home to roost.
And now, by the way, is there a humanitarian corridor for civilians who don't want any part of this to escape the Idlib province before the worst of the war breaks out there?
Yes, I believe there are two.
But the jihadis are trying to stop people from from using these corridors, which have been set up by by the Russian military police.
But they exist.
And there's every possibility, were it not for the jihadi snipers, for civilians to leave.
A number have left.
Several thousand have have left, have joined government controlled territory.
But of course, they've got Turkey at the back of the back of them.
But if the worst comes to the worst, they can the civilians can always go across the border for a short period.
This is what happened in the south.
You you'll recall the people of the Deraa and Quneitra areas retreated to the border area with Jordan.
Then after a couple of weeks, they all went back and everybody lives happily ever after down south.
Well, and you know, it's funny all this about there is no canal here.
And what the hell?
Who cares?
The only thing here is that supposedly Syria is a pipeline of weapons to Hezbollah, but Iran can just fly a plane to Beirut anyway, right?
So what do they need a land bridge for?
This whole thing is based on nonsense.
The thinking is Victorian, the era before we had airplanes.
It's ludicrous.
And this passes with serious strategic thinking in some of the Washington think tanks.
It's ridiculous.
Well, the whole thing about a land bridge, a highway, in other words, they don't even have a highway, right?
It's not like there's one big highway system from Tehran to Baghdad and then through Iraqi Sunni stand and the Syrian east.
Right.
There's no highway.
And as though, Scott, the Iranians would be so stupid as to put sensitive military equipment on a truck passing through Iraq, where you get a U.S. agent every kilometer of the way, when they could pop it in an airplane, it'd be in Beirut in two hours.
Yeah.
Well, OK, but so, I mean, up until 2005, the Syrian army occupied southern Lebanon.
And I guess as far as I know, the accusations are credible, right, that they would have helped Iran arm up Hezbollah and all that.
And yet, but that all ended after the killing of Hariri back in 2005 anyway.
So how important has the Syrian has the Assad government even been to supporting Hezbollah?
It seems more like Hezbollah came to save his ass when he got in trouble rather than they needed him.
Exactly.
And bear in mind that northern Israel in Israel's entire history has never had such a long period of peace since 2006, that last war that was basically a draw between Israel and Hezbollah.
And since that time, Hezbollah has ensured the peace of northern Israel.
There hasn't even been a Katyusha, a minor rocket attack.
Why?
Because there's a mutuality of deterrence.
Deterrence works and it has given northern Israel more than a decade of peace.
They don't know when they're lucky.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems like and this goes to Assad, I guess, you know, they demonize him.
But they're kind of right in the sense that all politicians are demons in a way.
And certainly he ran a police state before this war ever broke out.
And yet, you know, the propaganda is that he's responsible for every death in the war when it seems like, well, tell me what you think of this.
Seems to me like there would have never really been a war at all if it had not been for America, Turkey, Saudi, Qatar and Israel intervening on their side in this war all this time.
And that otherwise Assad would have put down whatever insurrections in 2011.
And that would have been the end of the thing.
And al-Nusra would have never had a chance to grow into this mess without the Americans.
So in that sense, you could put a lot more responsibility on the foreign invaders rather than the sovereign government of the country for putting down the insurrection, you know, regardless of what kind of police state that government is instituting there.
But that's right.
All we've managed to do is prolong the agony.
We haven't even by our own stated objectives, we've failed.
We even on bombing for use of chemical weapons.
It's been it's happened twice already.
You know, we by our own standards, the policy of bombing has failed and it's going to fail a third time.
When will we ever learn?
And we have been pumping literally billions of a billion dollars a year for about five years.
That was the CIA program until Trump commendably stopped it last year.
A billion dollars of your taxpayer dollars a year helping jihadis.
And it hasn't even won the war for the jihadis.
It's just prolonged the agony.
Well, you know, it really has been apparent all along, too, that Obama was afraid to really commit to this thing the way he'd done in Libya.
And that which was bad enough, but that he really kind of knew all along and was afraid of what it would look like if the rebels really won.
That was why, you know, he would kind of try to only commit to non-lethal aid and helping the allies with their lethal aid and kind of hedging at first, at least, before really escalating the thing later on.
But he really knew better.
I found an article that I'd written back in 2013, in like the spring of 2013, saying, you know, they may have already decided that they're going to abandon these jihadis and leave them high and dry to be backstabbed and killed like the Bay of Pigs.
Or they may not have decided what to do at all.
The Israelis said, our policy is we don't want to see either side win.
We just want to see both sides continue to hemorrhage to death.
That was on the front page of the New York Times, by the way.
All you have to do is Google hemorrhage to death and it'll come right up.
But yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right?
Because you'd have to be a damn fool to really want to see Jolani victorious over Assad.
Nobody's that crazy.
They might be that evil, but they're not that stupid at this point, right?
And so they never really did.
After all, Obama or, you know, for that matter, any of the British prime ministers, they could have bombed Assad off the face of the earth with just their air forces this whole time, the way they did in Libya.
They didn't.
They were always afraid to go that far, even though, like you said, they prolonged the war all this time.
Remember Iraq.
Remember Iraq.
There was no plan for what happens after you get rid of Saddam.
They hadn't thought it through.
There was no planning for the after Saddam in the same way that they can never answer the question if you get a chance to put it to them ever.
And they avoid it constantly.
There is no plan for what would follow Assad if he was removed.
Because the answer is the jihadis.
The answer would be the head of Al-Nusra, the strongest Islamic radical.
Isn't it ironic that Trump, Trump of all people, is leading the charge with his ridiculous lieutenant John Bolton, Jihadi John, in favor of installing an Islamic radical government in an extremely sensitive location in the Middle East?
It's crazy.
Yeah.
In fact, you know, it's funny because in the neocon movement that Bolton runs around in, there's a split where some of them hate Muslims so much that they put their own point of view on that above Israeli policy.
So in this case, they go, hey, we'll take an Alawite dictatorship over the Muslim Brotherhood or anything that smacks of it, no matter what.
So even though the Likud position is, no, we hate Iran more and therefore we hate Assad and Hezbollah more, for Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller and some of these.
Which, you know, so I guess what I'm saying is Bolton ought to be able to go either way on this.
I think he had sort of de-emphasized Syria in the past.
He would rather just bomb the Ayatollah, but said that, you know, I don't know if we really need to get rid of Assad because, again, those consequences we were talking about.
Well, go figure.
Don't look for any coherence in Bolton's thinking.
But he seems to have an atavistic hatred of Iran and sees Syria through that prism, essentially.
Getting rid of Assad in his book is just a way of getting at Iran.
Well, and Jolani and Baghdadi are both still out there.
And when both of them are dead, I mean, we're still talking about guys who have pledged their loyalty.
I mean, in the case of Jolani, anyway, to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And I guess the leader of al-Qaeda and Baghdadi is, you know, basically equivalent to Zawahiri himself.
So that's who we're talking about.
And they're the dominant forces.
I mean, is there anyone to challenge them on the jihadi side at all here?
Essentially, no.
Their kind of cover group, HTS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, it's essentially the al-Qaeda front organization.
They, in numbers wise, they're perhaps only about 30 percent, but they control the main strategic locations.
And they are the toughest fighters, the best trained, the best equipment.
They are top dogs.
But there are still important pockets of ISIS, pockets of these guys from Central Asia called Uyghurs.
Some of them are Chinese.
They're also very good fighters.
Their group is called the Turkestan Islamic Party.
It's a hodgepodge of jihadi militias, but al-Qaeda rule the roost.
Yeah.
Well, back in the Suez crisis, it was like Eisenhower and he was the cooler head who prevailed.
And as you said, told all the allies that they better back off.
But I guess we don't have the Americans to play that role this time.
So I guess we'll see what happens here.
Exactly.
That's what makes it so scary.
There's no adult in the room.
And I guess we didn't really talk about this part of it, but you figure that the British and the French are just as bad on this right now?
Oh, the British are even worse.
I think actually the British have been manipulating the US by actually conniving, setting up some of these fake scenarios.
After all, nobody gets killed in the fake scenarios, do they?
So it's not like they were killing civilians or anything.
And it's in a good cause, they would say.
They're just setting up Assad for what he has coming.
That's how they would rationalize it.
And there is ample evidence that British companies, private contractors with links to British intelligence have been directing, supplying and advising the White Helmets, these so-called rescuers who are the jihadi auxiliaries.
Who are the public relations men for the al-Qaeda guys, basically.
Yeah, exactly.
The British have been, in a sense, leading Donald Trump by the nose on this.
He should be aware of it.
I hope one of his advisors at least might insinuate this thought to him.
One of the leaks from the Woodward book is that he wanted to attack Assad and kill Assad personally.
In response to, I forget if it was the 2017 or 2018 hoax there, Duma or Khan Shaikoun.
But either way, and that they talked him down.
And on one hand, actually, that's believable.
But as a cherry-picked anecdote, it makes it seem like he's the worst one in his government on Syria, which maybe he was that day.
But it seems like it's the rest of his government who are determined to really focus on.
When he saw the photographs that his daughter had plucked off the internet, the fakes, the red mist.
The red mist descended over Donald's eyes and he went bananas.
But his instincts appear to draw him towards caution and moderation.
Yeah, life as a cartoon character.
Yeah, yeah.
A presidency as a cartoon character.
Hey, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show.
And I would keep interviewing you for a long time if I could, but I'm so late for my next show here.
I got to go.
But thank you very much for coming on, Peter.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
All right, you guys, that's Peter Ford.
He used to be the U.K. ambassador to Syria.
And he's got this important article.
It's at MiddleEastEye.net.
Is a Syrian Suez approaching?
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
